identification of secretory protein - (Apr/17/2008 )

Hi Friends,

Can anyone help me to find out whether a protein is a secretory protein or not? . Is there any specialized techniques to identify a secretory protein?

-Caecilian-

hibioinformatic algorithms, such as SignalP, give a good indication if a protein is secreted through the presence of a signal peptide, not only this but using bioinformatic analysis you can look for the presence of conserved domains and certain secretory features. However, this just gives you an indication. Experimentally you should do an immunoblot on subcellular fractions to find out where the protein is, which should indicate if it is secreted or not.